Welding Tips and Tricks

Hey guys, so I'm in welding school and were working on running beads on stainless right now. I started to get consistent with my dabbing, but whenever I try to feed the wire I lose concentration on dabbing and become inconsistent and sometimes hit the tungsten with the wire.

So how should I feed the filler wire? Should I do it every dab? Or every couple of dabs?

Don't stress out too much about feeding the filler through to give yourself more dabbing rod. Most stuff will allow you to stop and reposition your hand. I have about 200mm or so sticking out of my hand and dab that until I run out, stop and repeat. The beauty of tig is that you can start up again and make it look like nothing happened.

I feed rod every time. It's much easier that way for me.

This is a topic that always gets at least a dozen different answers.

Feeding rod is difficult for uncoordinated people, so some people will invariably have a more difficult time at it. I don't believe it's intuitive for too many however, so it helps to practice. Just get a filler rod and practice feeding it...good to practice with both hand if you can. You never know when you'll need to swap your torch hand for a given task. If you do it over and over it will get more comfortable. Even if you practice for 15 minutes a day, I bet in a matter of 2 weeks you would get way more comfortable with it. Since you can focus on that hand specific when you practice without welding, you can train yourself to feed properly. This is to say that say that learn how to feed even before you coordinate your feed and torch.

I kind of look at it in a similar way as chopsticks. Some people just end up stabbing the food with them out of frustration.

There are some feeding type devices. They kind of remind me of a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.

Cheers,
Alan

Yep, hearing ya buddy. It's just a matter of practice, practice, practice. Took me ages, despite being a drummer, and used to the hands moving to different beats. After a while it'll just become natural.